


eyes like the sun

by choomchoom



Category: Transformers: Cyberverse
Genre: (but really s2 did half the work for me), Canonical Character Death, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, SPOILERS for Cyberverse s2, temporarily, the Allspark is a singularity and that means it does what i say it does
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-25 17:17:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20915717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: The Allspark has been emitting flares of energy that threaten the Ark's inhabitants. Bizarrely, the flares coincide with Slipstream appearing in Windblade's dreams.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> s2 bodyslammed me with slipstream/windblade feels. here they all are
> 
> no major content warnings, but this fic treats the violence in cyberverse a tad more seriously than cyberverse itself does

There’s a moment, when Windblade turns and sees Slipstream behind her, when anything could happen. It takes her a moment to notice the concealed fear in Slipstream’s expression – mostly, she’s seen Slipstream gritting her teeth in the heat of battle, or yelling, or smiling viciously as she executes a particularly clever attack. It’s strange to see her this close to neutrality, and this close to Windblade.

Then Slipstream warns Windblade about Starscream, and it shatters.

Windblade still doesn’t know what she expected. Certainly not an apology. She hasn't earned one – most of what Slipstream has done to Windblade, Windblade has done right back. But Slipstream had come to her during a parley, weapons sheathed, on purpose. For that moment, it had felt like they were on the verge of something.

Windblade thinks about that moment a lot.

* * *

On the Ark, Windblade dreams of Slipstream.

She always feels awful about it after she wakes up, because it’s not like she ever dreamed about Slipstream while Slipstream was alive. Slipstream had been irritating and then frustrating and then fascinating, but it’s not like Windblade can claim to have cared about her.

And still.

One night, she’s laughing with Slipstream in the Ark’s energon suite. Another night, they’re flying, racing like they only ever really did in a fight. Slipstream lets Windblade make circles around her in the air, speeds away and lets Windblade catch up when she guns it to follow. Another night, they’re back on Cybertron at a dance club, alone, Slipstream’s body pressed close to Windblade’s, her voice in Windblade’s audial making her shiver.

She’s still trying to figure out what Slipstream is saying when she wakes up with a start, onlining her optics only to realize that the lights in her habsuite are out.

“That’s not good,” Bumblebee comments from the berth next to hers as they both detach their recharge cables and stand up.

“Let’s go find out what’s happening.” Windblade clicks on her landing lights to manually unlock the door. Bee sticks close behind her as they walk, his own headlights darting all around the hallway.

They bump into Arcee and Hot Rod almost immediately and have enough time to establish that no, none of them knows what’s going on, before the lights flicker and then return. Wheeljack’s on the intercom a moment later.

“Sorry about that, folks, turns out using an unknowably ancient and powerful energy source to power your ship has its ups and downs. The Allspark put out a pulse of energy too strong for my generator aaaaand broke it. We’re currently hooked up to the Ark’s original engine, and I’ll have the Allspark back up and working for us in a jif. Wheeljack out.”

“That’s not very comforting,” Hot Rod observes. “I thought the Allspark was supposed to be on our side?”

“It’s the Allspark. None of us knows what it’s supposed to do,” Arcee replies.

“I’m going to go to the lab to…supervise,” Windblade says, half because she genuinely thinks it’s necessary and half because the thought of trying to fall asleep right now with the not-memory of Slipstream’s lips almost touching her helm on her mind is…not great.

Bumblebee starts a conversation with Hot Rod and Arcee, and Windblade suspects he’ll end up crashing in their hab. She’s too distracted to feel bad for abandoning him as she makes her way across the ship, using her command-status override instead of knocking on the door to the lab.

“What – oh, hi Windblade.” Wheeljack is crouched in front of the Allspark, which looks exactly the way it always looks these days: too bright to look directly at, and emitting a warmth that goes directly to Windblade’s spark.

“How’s it going?” Windblade asks.

“Already fixed.” Wheeljack pulls a tool out from between his teeth to say it. “The Allspark has done this before – I assume it’s got something to do with the souls rattling around inside it. I reinforced the backup energy sink to accommodate larger flares, just in case it happens again. But, well.” He scratches at the back of his head with a spanner. “It’s the Allspark. I don’t know how big these flares might get.”

The implications of that are…unpleasant. The Allspark is singlehandedly keeping them flying and in energon, so it’s not like they can just space it if it gets too dangerous. If anyone can figure it out, though, it’s Wheeljack.

“Tell me if it happens again,” Windblade says. “There has to be a pattern.”

* * *

Slipstream flying beside her, steady and silent for what feels, in the dream, like years. Windblade transforming into a landing, feeling Slipstream slam into her back and tumbling to the ground with her, but not striking her after, just turning Windblade’s face to hers and staring into her optics. Slipstream dancing, crying, laughing, flying, standing still at the edge of a cliff and when Windblade walks up to try to touch her, disappearing in a flash of light.

Windblade wakes up and covers her face with her hands. _Not again_. It’s instinct, now, to reach for her communicator, and unsurprising, now, that she has a message from Wheeljack.

_Another flare_ and the time it started, to the femtosecond.

Windblade clicks back through her messages – since the power outage, all of her messages from Wheeljack have come in the middle of her recharge cycle, and each time she’s woken up right after they arrive, even though she keeps non-emergency notifications off while she’s sleeping.

She looks over at Bee, sound asleep in the other berth. _It’s not happening to all of us. _

Part of her feels like she’s still in the dream, like she can reach out and brush Slipstream’s plating with her fingers.

It’s ridiculous. Slipstream died on Earth, months ago. Her spark is one with the Allspark.

And. Well.

The Allspark is right here.

She goes to Cheetor. Optimus would take a guess at what to do, anything to reassure the rest of them, Bumblebee wouldn’t have a clue (and the thought of having to explain the dreams to him…yeah, no), and Wheeljack would get ideas. She finds Cheetor on the observation deck, looking out at the blackness around them as if he’s expecting a quiz on it later. “Has Wheeljack told you about what’s going on with the Allspark?”

“Actually, I alerted him to the problem,” Cheetor says, sparing a second to glance at Windblade before fixing his gaze back out the window.

“How did you know that something was wrong?”

“I could feel it.” Cheetor’s hand moves to clench the plating over his spark. “There’s something out of place inside it. More likely some_one_.”

Windblade tenses with…something. A piece slotting into place in the puzzle, and worry that anything wrong with the _Allspark_ is by definition too much for the crew to handle, and something else that feels, bizarrely, like hope. “What do you mean?”

“The center of the Allspark is a singularity; it exists in infinite time and space. It’s contained within an outer casing that can capture and direct the energy it emits. Wheeljack has a theory that sparks work the same way.” He looks over at Windblade, who nods. “I passed through the outer layer on my way from the Allspark into this world. It was empty. It’s supposed to be empty, so that in times of need, it can be controlled by outsiders. For it to be doing this…there must be someone who the Allspark perceives as inside and outside of it simultaneously. Someone stuck.”

“Someone who died recently?” Windblade can’t help but ask.

“Yes. This never happened before the Allspark was taken from me.” Cheetor’s hands curl into fists at his sides.

Unfortunately, that’s a clue.

* * *

Starscream is lying on his back in his cell, humming some Earth song that Windblade remembers Bumblebee liking back in the day. He doesn’t deign her with a glance until she’s stepped all the way up to his cell, arms crossed over her chest, and even then he doesn’t bother to get up, just looks at her sidelong. “And what have I done to merit an appearance from _you_?”

“Broke the Allspark,” Windblade says. _That_ gets her a response. Starscream’s optics widen in skepticism, but his frame tenses.

“I suppose you’ll have to let me take a look,” Starscream says, actually rising to a sitting position on the berth, and Windblade has to think of Slipstream to keep herself from laughing. Slipstream, who died trying to warn the rest of them about Starscream. Slipstream, who might still be alive today if it weren’t for him. One of Slipstream’s last words was _Starscream_, and she had deserved so much better.

That he’s alive and Slipstream’s dead is a blade in Windblade’s spark, actually. “What did you do to it?” she asks instead of bothering to respond to his bait.

“Why should I tell you anything?”

“You’ve been complaining that you’re bored. I’m making conversation.”

“Because I like you, despite that ugly thing on your chest, I’ll tell you.”

Windblade has to suppress a shiver of revulsion. She adjusts her posture so that her Autobot badge points right at his face.

“I had Acid Storm trying to break through the Allspark’s seal. They succeeded, eventually.” He pauses for drama; Windblade refuses to react. “Acid Storm’s first idea was to pry pieces of the casing off manually. It should have worked, if the Allspark made any kind of scientific sense. It destroyed all of Acid Storm’s equipment and nearly brought down our hideout.”

“When?”

“What?”

“When did that happen?”

“13.8.4878.214. Are you writing me a biography?” Windblade’s not listening anymore. She can hardly hear him over the roar in her audials.

The night Slipstream had died, Acid Storm had tried to break open the Allspark.

* * *

She doesn’t know who to go to for answers anymore, so she goes to the Allspark.

Wheeljack’s out of the lab, hopefully recharging for once, so it’s only the steady whir of machinery that surrounds her as she looks just to the side of its burning brightness. She thinks of Slipstream, alone and unmoored in there, and isn't sure what to think or feel.

The door slides open, and Windblade turns, grateful for the distraction. “Oh. Hello,” Cheetor says, taking a half-step back upon seeing her.

“Hello,” Windblade says. Cheetor is easier to read than anyone she’s ever met, and right now he’s radiating discomfort. “What’s going on?”

“I just…didn’t expect to see you here, is all,” he says. He comes to stand next to her, in front of the Allspark.

“There’s a flare coming,” he says after a moment. “I can feel it.”

“Okay.” That’s obviously not the worst of it.

“I was going to try to enter the Allspark and try to guide that lost spark inside,” Cheetor says. “The Allspark put me out here to guard it, but I think it would understand. It’s in safe hands now, but it won’t be if it flares badly enough to break apart the ship.”

“You’re not going to do that,” Windblade says calmly, at the same moment as she decides that it’s true. “I’m going to be the one to go in there. And I’m going to bring her back.”

“Windblade, don’t be ridiculous,” Cheetor says. “You’re not going in there. You could die. And…did you say _her_? Do you know who it is in there?” 

It feels to uncertain to say _yes_, so Windblade nods. “What do I have to do?” She can almost already see the glow of the Allspark brightening.

“You can’t –”

“_What do I have to do?” _

“Just touch it.” Cheetor’s voice is soft. Something in her tone must have barely swayed him. “That’s all.”

Windblade doesn’t plan, or think, or expect anything in particular to happen next. She takes a step forward and puts her hand up to the Allspark. It’s not solid, and she trips forward into it, the Ark vanishing around her until her surroundings are pure white on all sides.

She wakes up in the snow.


	2. Chapter 2

“Oh. You’re Windblade now.”

Windblade feels like her brain module is still catching up to her surroundings. So when she hears Slipstream’s voice, she orients toward it thoughtlessly, most of her processing power still trying to decide it the cold and wet around her is real or not.

Then her optics meet Slipstream’s, and she remembers why she came here. She bolts to her feet, fuel pump hammering in her chest. It doesn’t matter if the air and snow and ice are real. Slipstream is _here_. “Slipstream!”

“Yes, yes, you’re very excited to see me.” Slipstream rolls her optics and turns away.

Windblade already feels off-balance again. Slipstream is here, maybe alive in some nebulous way, and she isn’t making any sense.

“How did you die, anyway?”

“_What_?” Windblade says it with a little too much aggression – Slipstream asking her a nonsense question makes the conversation feel, briefly, like their old battlefield banter.

“You’re not going to wear me down. I don’t care whose body you take over to lure me into the Afterspark. I won’t go.”

“Slipstream, I’m not dead.”

That gets her an unimpressed glance, which is, she supposes, an improvement. “Then why are you here?”

“Because you are.” Windblade doesn’t know how to make it make sense.

“Ugh. If we’re going to talk to each other let’s at least get out of this cold.” Slipstream transforms without waiting for Windblade, and with a complicated sense of familiarity, Windblade lurches into her own transformation and follows Slipstream into the sky.

The snow surrounds them, and Slipstream flies straight upwards, towards the clouds. Windblade’s still preparing a smart remark about how it’s not going to be any warmer up there when she follows Slipstream’s punch through a cloud, her visibility zero for a moment, and then emerges behind Slipstream someplace completely different.

Of course this isn’t really Earth. It’s the Allspark.

Slipstream angles for a landing, and Windblade follows, looking past Slipstream at the trees and grasses and rivers that Slipstream is leading her to. This is Windblade’s favorite part of Earth, too, but that doesn’t feel important to say right now.

Slipstream is leaning against a tree, arms and legs crossed, when Windblade lands and transforms. What _is _it with Decepticons and their dramatic posturing?

Slipstream’s stillness and the sunlight here give Windblade a chance to really look at her. She looks the same, mostly, but Windblade’s optics are drawn to her waist, where there’s a faint scar from Bludgeon’s blade.

It doesn’t make sense. Windblade saw her spark fade and her optics go out in death. And here she is.

Slipstream regards Windblade silently, and Windblade takes the moment, counting the pulses of her fuel pump as she tries to orient herself to the situation. Slipstream’s really here, and Windblade is here too and…it’s possible that she didn’t actually plan this far ahead. She’s certain that there’s a way to get herself and Slipstream back to reality safely. She doesn’t know if that belief is something the Allspark is giving her, or the beginnings of a plan, or simple naivete, but it’s there. There’s a way out, and she just has to find it.

And of course, if she loses that certainty, the weight of what she’s done will catch up with her and she’ll probably collapse under it.

“There’s nowhere you want to take me?” Slipstream challenges.

“Out, eventually,” Windblade says. “Once I figure out how.”

Out of nowhere, Slipstream pushes off the tree she’s leaning against and takes a quick step forward, shoulder’s squared for a fight. Windblade takes an instinctive step back.

And Slipstream’s momentum is gone as quickly as it had come, and she’s standing calmly, a step closer to Windblade. “You’re really not one of them. You’re really here.”

“I’m here.”

“You _are _dead, though.”

Windblade rolls her optics. If that’s as much as she can get Slipstream to believe, fine. She changes the topic. “Is this the first time you’ve seen me in here?”

Slipstream’s optics narrow and she takes a step back.

Windblade gives her time. She knows, that with all the business of the Afterspark sending mirages after her, that the question will be scrutinized. But with Slipstream standing so close to her now, she’s overcome with the knowledge that the Slipstream from her dreams was as real as she was unfamiliar. This version of Slipstream, standing guarded but calm in front of her, isn’t just familiar from that one moment WIndblade had seen of her at the parley. There really had to have been something of her dancing with Windblade, flying with Windblade, touching Windblade, in those contextless half-remembered moments. She can’t not ask.

“Sort of,” Slipstream says after a beat. “You were always…not quite real. Every time I tried to talk to you you’d disappear.”

“Sorry,” says Windblade.

“You’re such an Autobot. What in the cosmos are you sorry for?”

Another Autobot would have absolved her. Of course Slipstream challenges her. The answer, of course, is that Windblade is sorry for every unfairness that led to this moment. She’s sorry that she didn’t see Bludgeon’s sword or cry out a warning quicker. She’s sorry that she wasn’t strong enough to kill him when she had the chance. She’s sorry about whatever happened that made Slipstream a Decepticon in the first place, even though she had the capacity for good inside her. “It’s complicated.”

Slipstream grins at that, and Windblade’s spark flips inside its casing. “Everything’s complicated. Hey, check this out.” She doesn’t wait for Windblade to acknowledge her before she transforms and flies off.

Windblade follows her. It’s not even a choice.

She follows Slipstream over more forest, and it’s only a few minutes before there’s a sunrise in front of them. She follows Slipstream past the sun, through more clouds, and then they’re over an ocean. There’s an island in the middle and Slipstream angles for it. It’s small enough that Windblade has to circle around once to avoid crashing into Slipstream when she transforms and lands.

“If you’re not one of the goons from the Afterspark, that means I’m due for one,” Slipstream explains. “From here, we’ll be able to see it when it comes.”

Slipstream’s voice is flat and dispassionate, and at the same time as she shudders to think of referring to her own friends as _it_ in that tone, Windblade thinks of all the other Seekers, all murdered by Starscream. Her spark clenches. 

“Who have they sent?” she asks.

Instead of answering, Slipstream groans. “Slag. You are real.”

Windblade turns to follow Slipstream’s gaze in time for the flying speck on the horizon to resolve into a flying green speck, and then into Acid Storm.

“I don’t suppose you’re actually alive too?” Slipstream asks, voice hard and hostile and more familiar than it’s been so far today, and she already has an integrated gun raised toward Acid Storm.

“Of course not,” Acid Storm says, calm and placating and wholly different than Windblade had ever known them in life. “You need to leave the Autobot. Come with me.”

“Sorry, kid,” Slipstream says. “I’ve heard this routine before.” Her face screws up in a grimace, and she barely twitches as she shoots Acid Storm between the optics. Acid Storm doesn’t fall; their frame simply fritzes with light, then fades to nothing.

Slipstream turns her gun to the sky and unloads what looks like the rest of her ammunition. Then she sinks to a knee, one hand on the ground and her helm resting on the other.

There are things Windblade could say, things about leadership and grief and guilt. Slipstream doesn’t give her room. “Why did they have to follow him?” she asks.

Windblade feels uneasy hovering over her, so she slips down too. “I think you already know the answer.”

“Of course I do. I followed him once.”

“Why?” Windblade doesn’t know if asking that will help. But it might, and she definitely wants to know.

“It was easy.” Slipstream’s still staring at the ground. “Then you had to go and make it…not easy.”

* * *

Slipstream takes Windblade around this tiny, odd world. She thinks up an excuse for the first several trips, but she stops around when Windblade figures out that they’re moving because of Slipstream’s restlessness, rather than out of any real need to. They circle back through the ice, and the forest, and the ocean, and lots of other places – some resembling Earth, some resembling Cybertron – that Slipstream knows unsettlingly well.

They talk.

“Drift changed his mind. You’re not the first. And I hope not the last,” Windblade says, at the top of a Cybertronian skyscraper that Windblade remembers from before the war flattened it.

“Every living Decepticon thinks _Drift_ is a coward.” It’s progress, probably, that Slipstream doesn’t call him by his old name.

“And they’re wrong. You know they’re wrong about lots of other things.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

Eventually, Slipstream asks about Bludgeon. “Did Megatron at least banish him?”

He didn’t, but there’s no need to hurt Slipstream with that fact. “I fought him. He almost overpowered me, but my friend got an anti-gravity patch on him. I don’t know what happened after that.”

Slipstream’s optics are narrow. She looks a little like she did right before she was killed – scared, but in a pensive, long-term sort of way. “_You _fought him?”

Windblade can’t help it; she bristles and crosses her arms. “You know I can hold my own in a fight.”

“You managed to stay alive against my team for almost a year. Past me would shoot me dead before letting me say it, but yeah, you’re good.”

_I did more than stay alive_, Windblade thinks_. I found Grimlock. I kept Bumblebee safe. I recovered the Ark_. It’s never enough. “I should have killed him.”

Inexplicably, Slipstream laughs. “Never thought I’d hear _you _say something like that.”

“It’s not a very Autobot thing to say. I don’t care.”

“I thought you lot were supposed to be nice all the time.”

“No one can be nice all the time. We just do our best.”

“Really?”

Windblade has to look right at Slipstream to see if she’s serious. They’re standing next to each other, looking out over the edge of a cliff, waves breaking far below them.

Slipstream’s optics are keen on Windblade’s expression, questioning. Still… “You’re serious?”

“Your side would have won a long time ago if you’d been willing to use our tactics,” Slipstream says, like it’s fact.

“That would defeat the point.”

“There is no point, when you’re a Decepticon,” she says. “The only way this ends is if we burn each other down.”

“Not if we win,” Windblade can’t help saying. She catches Slipstream’s meaning, though. It’s not like she can pretend that it hadn’t felt good to go at Slipstream and the others with everything she had, back when she’d been basically alone and desperate to keep herself and Bumblebee alive. Under that kind of strain, violence had been a relief. She tries to imagine feeling that way all the time and can’t.

* * *

Slipstream takes a seat in the shadow of a war-ravaged rust dune. “There’s no explanation for me being here except that I have unfinished business topside.”

“You’re here because of a technical malfunction.”

Slipstream is curled around herself. She looks small, like this, smaller than Windblade could have ever imagined her. She wonders if this is the Allspark distorting things, or if she really looks like this, the perfect shape for Windblade to curl around. “Ha. The Allspark doesn’t have technical malfunctions.”

“Not naturally, no. But Starscream.” Windblade doesn’t bother to finish her sentence – Slipstream will catch her meaning, and she suspects that neither of them want to talk about Starscream.

Slipstream props her head on a knee and stares at the dune in front of her. “We’ve been doing this awhile now. If you’re _really_ not dead, what’s your plan to get us out of here?”

Time passes differently in the Allspark. Windblade’s chronometer stopped when she went in, but every so often she’ll check and find that time has passed. It doesn’t correlate at all with how much time she _feels_ has passed here with Slipstream. The incongruity is enough that she has, in fact, come up with a plan. “You said the mirages come on a schedule?”

Slipstream nods, looking surprised.

“I think that’s when the Allspark flares. When–” The truth lodges in Windblade’s throat, but there’s no point keeping it from Slipstream. “I was having dreams of you, when those happened. And that’s how I got here.”

“We’ll circle back to escaping. You were _dreaming_ of me?”

“Those times you saw me before I really arrived,” Windblade says. “That’s what it was for me.”

“I suppose it would be you,” Slipstream says. By now, Windblade doesn’t have to ask out loud to get her to explain. She just tilts her head to the side, and Slipstream acquiesces. “All the Seekers I was commanding were gone. I never had friends, exactly, in the Decepticons. If there was anyone topside for me to reach out to, or whatever, it had to be you.”

That would sound impressively sad, if Windblade didn’t happen to be a little bit obsessed with Slipstream in return. “I’m glad it was.”

“It’s not just because you were fun to be enemies with, and not just because of how you never gave up, against all the odds.” Windblade nods; Slipstream has told her before that it’s this, of all pieces of Windblade, that made Slipstream start to question her faction and choices. “When I showed up at the parley, you listened to me, and you believed me. You believed me _instantly._ I had to wonder if you'd been waiting for me to do something like that, if you would have helped me sooner if I’d known how to ask.”

Windblade only vaguely knows what Slipstream is talking about. She knows that calling the command structures in the Decepticons toxic is an understatement, and she can guess that Slipstream’s promotion was more power game than reward. That doesn’t seem like the most important thing right now, though, when Slipstream is sitting next to her, elbow brushing Windblade’s knee.

“Of course I was. I’m here, aren’t I?”

Slipstream’s smile still makes Windblade’s spark flip.

* * *

Windblade’s plan doesn’t work.

They go back to the snowy part of the outer layer when Slipstream says it’s time, avoid the ghost of Thundercracker flying toward them, and fly upwards, through the clouds. They end up on familiar steppes of asteroids, which is what’s normally in this direction, and Windblade finally remembers to be afraid.

This had been her only idea. And here they are.

“How could I have been so stupid?” Windblade transforms into a landing just so she can ineffectually stomp on the ground. It’s not the smooth surface of this asteroid that she has a problem with, or the Allspark itself, despite everything, and stomping doesn’t help. “I thought that if I took this risk, if I made this choice that the Allspark was obviously guiding me toward, then maybe I would catch a fragging break. I find Bumblebee, he doesn’t even remember who he is. I find the Ark, and there are already Decepticons on our tailpipes. I find you, and we’re stuck here.” Her vocalizer fritzes. She can’t remember the last time she let herself be this upset. But why not? There’s no goal, no plan, no way forward. It doesn’t matter what she does or how she feels. There’s no way out.

“You didn’t have to come here.” Slipstream sounds defensive.

“I didn’t have to do any of it. I volunteered to come to Earth. I couldn’t abandon Bumblebee or the Autobots, and I couldn’t abandon you, because that’s not the kind of person that I am. I just wish that for once the universe would stop testing me.”

“I can’t help with that but...I never said.” Slipstream places a hand is on Windblade’s shoulder, and that’s what it takes to make Windblade realize that she’s shaking. “You didn’t have to come after me. I can’t say that I would have done the same thing. Thank you.”

It’s all pointless. It doesn’t matter if Slipstream is alive, if Windblade is alive, if they’re together. It doesn’t matter if they can’t ever leave this place and make it _count_.

But with Slipstream’s hand steady on her plating, Windblade realizes that maybe it does.

She’s turned and hauled Slipstream into a hug before she consciously thinks. The weight of the mistake she’s made is enough to crush Windblade, and if Slipstream is offering to let Windblade draw on her strength, she’s going to take it.

She’s aware immediately that it’s been a long time since Slipstream has been hugged. She freezes, first, then places cautious hands on Windblade’s waist. She stays there until Windblade is ready to let go.

* * *

“Maybe I should go.”

“What?” Windblade lifts her head up from its resting place on Slipstream’s chest. They’ve been hanging out on the asteroid steppes for…a while. Windblade still hasn’t gotten a handle on the passage of time here and she has no interest in trying.

“Next mirage. Maybe I should follow it. I drew you here, right? Maybe if I go through, you can leave.”

Windblade lifts herself away from Slipstream entirely, her processor spinning as she sits up.

Before she fully processes the offer, she knows that she can’t say no. Windblade can’t abandon Bumblebee and Optimus and everyone when Slipstream is offering her another option.

And of course she can’t say yes. She doesn’t give up. That’s all that’s kept her going sometimes, during the war and during those terrifying, lonely first few months on Earth. She can’t give up on Slipstream because she doesn't do that_. _

And on a level completely different from all of that, she can’t leave Slipstream. Windblade found her, through death itself, and Windblade is going to keep her.

But the thought of a thousand years stuck here, a million, eternity...

Windblade turns to Slipstream and kisses her.

There are no good choices in front of her. So this is her answer, and Slipstream can do what she will with it.

What Slipstream does is kiss her back, deeply and hungrily. Her arms slot around Windblade’s frame like they were made to and Slipstream’s fingers dig ever so slightly into the gaps between Windblade’s plating, making her gasp. Windblade loses herself in the overwhelming experience of kissing Slipstream, more feeling and motion and intensity between them than there was in any kiss Windblade has experienced before. Just a moment she thinks that it would suit her perfectly well to spend eternity like this.

Then the light becomes too bright to ignore.

Settings don’t change here. There’s the perpetual sunset in the forest, and the preprogrammed waves that crash below the cliff. The light that’s hitting Windblade’s dimmed optics now is too bright for the asteroids, too bright for anything but the sky above the snow.

Slipstream pulls away before Windblade does, keeping her helm inches from Windblade’s as she orients toward it.

Windblade lets her nose brush the side of Slipstream’s helm as Windblade’s gaze follows hers. She gasps, and she’s lucky her vocalizer has fritzed with shock, because it keeps her from saying _by the Allspark._

Because it’s clearly the Allspark that has done this. The portal in front of them glows bright white at the edges, but through it is Wheeljack’s lab, clear as day.

“It could be a trap,” Slipstream says.

“I don’t care,” says Windblade. “It could be real.”

When she stands, Slipstream stands with her. Her hand finds Windblade’s.

“That’s the Ark out there,” Windblade clarifies. Slipstream deserves to have all the information.

“I’ll take off my badge,” says Slipstream. “But I’m not changing my paint.”

Windblade doesn’t bother to hide her grin. “I would never ask you to.”

Slipstream steps with Windblade as she makes her way through the portal. It feels like she’s somersaulting in place for just a moment, and then she’s on the Ark, with its familiar artificial atmosphere and Wheeljack’s voice in her audial.

Slipstream’s hand is still in hers.


End file.
